Alternate Titles: AND … tits, Bugger is for Sodomy, Dog Japan’d, When “Damn it” Just Won’t Cut it, What Did My 16th Great-Grandfather Do to You?

Today we talk all about taboo words. Make sure you have your headphones in or are by yourself when you listen, because we are going through the gamut of profane and vile words in various languages for ideas, and we simply can’t dance around the nasty ones. Also, we review Lé by Mark Rosenfelder. Plus, stick around after the end music for a hilariously NSFW mashup.

We have no Will today, but we do have Adam Skoog from Sweden. After a good discussion about personal names where I continually refer to Chinese naming conventions, we talk with Adam about his wonderful language Kozea and the kooky videos he has created with it.

Today we talk about nonconfigurationality, that is what languages do with word order when it’s not needed to show semantic roles. William regales us with tales of Navajo animacy-based word order, Nahuatl shifting its numerals around, and Ancient Greek’s confounding tendency to separate adjectives from their noun phrases. Also, we talk about Ayeri, a wonderfully well-developed conlang by Carsten Becker

We just passed 3,000 total listens. Thanks to everyone who is downloading the podcast or listening on the site. We may not be one of the big boys in podcasting, but we have a strong, engaged audience. I’m grateful for that.

We talk about how to organize your conlang, from organizing your notes to writing the grammar and lexicon, and what software is out there to help you. Also, some stupid example sentences, and a little old language called Alurhsa.

We’re all about formality today, from the intricate politeness system of Korean to some crazy Nahuatl stuff to the subtle syntax of the English polite request. We talk on just what kind of things languages do to produce formal, polite, or literary language. Then we have a little discussion of Teonaht, which is quite a good conlang, though the site design drives us a little crazy.

We talk about kinship terminology: what kinds of kinship schemes exist in reality, how they are related to family structure and marriage customs, and where you can find resources to give you ideas about these concepts. We also talk a little about Tepa (which I mispronounce a couple of times in the episode, it should be [teva]), a conlang from someone who studies American languages and decided to make one.

George says: check out the LCS Podcast interview of Sheri Wells-Jensen. Meanwhile, on this side of the conlanging podosphere (literally, the other side, there are only two podcasts), we talk a little about how you can fill out that lexicon with words. And after that we talk about a language whose creator apparantly decided not to bother too much with words.

We talk at length about linguistic typology and all the weird and wonderful tendencies that human languages seem to have. We also talk a little on Láadan, the language for women that our own token woman isn’t too fond of (philosophy-wise, anyway).

We’re back to talk about scripts: what kind of script to use, how con-history fits into it, tips for developing a realistic script, etc. Then we talk about a language that, while not having a unique writing system per se, has incorporated existing systems in an interesting way.